Will the real John McCain stand up

All through his career, first as a hero of the Vietnam war and then in Capitol Hill, John McCain has been a maverick, unafraid to stand up to those he opposed. But now, as the presidential race hots up, the Republican candidate is busy befriending those he once despised and ridiculed - the religious right, the gun lobby and the Iraq war hawks. So what kind of man is Barack Obama up against? By Ed Pilkington

Ask any American what they know about John McCain and they will probably reply that he is a war hero who survived years of brutality in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. They might add that he is a maverick, free-thinking spirit who values independence and integrity above toeing the party line.

That is the Old John McCain, the one that has been written about in umpteen newspaper profiles, the one whose campaign bus is called the Straight Talk Express. But while all eyes have been on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a new John McCain has been emerging. For the past 407 days, since he threw his hat into the presidential ring in April 2007, McCain has been criss-crossing the country, presenting an image of himself that runs counter to his long-standing reputation.

Take the recent event he attended in Louisville, Kentucky. You do not need deep knowledge of American cultural symbolism to guess which particular special interest he had come to scratch this day. A sign near the entrance of the Louisville convention centre said: "Shooters enter here." And then there were the guns; thousands of them. Thick ones, thin ones, long ones, short ones. Remingtons, Copperheads, Benjamin Sheridan, Glock and Ruger - all were on display - along with pump-action shotguns straight out of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

It was into this bubbling broth of lethal weapons and reactionary politics - Oliver North was one of the guest speakers - that the senator for Arizona willingly threw himself. If Old John McCain had turned up to this annual convention of the National Rifle Association - one of America's most hard-core rightwing affiliations - the results could have been ugly. Old John McCain is loathed by the gun-toting right. After all, this was the man who proposed granting citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants, and - which is worse? - did so hand in hand with that enemy of the nation, Ted Kennedy. The same man who accused televangelists such as the late Jerry Falwell of being "agents of intolerance". The candidate whom the NRA opposed when he last ran for president, in 2000, swinging its four million active members instead behind George Bush.

So how did New John McCain get on this time in front of some 3,000 NRA supporters? He began by squinting into the teleprompter. And then he started pressing buttons. Button 1: "At the outset, let me recognise the life of a great American, Charlton Heston." (Huge cheer for the film actor and NRA president who died in April.) Button 2: "I opposed the ban on so-called 'assault weapons' which was first proposed after a California schoolyard shooting." (Another big cheer.) Button 3: he tells the crowd he stands for low taxes, less government, a bonfire of federal bureaucracy. Button 4: he vows to fight on in Iraq until the war is won. Button 5: he chucks in a reference to the greatness of America, and to God.

Then he stands back, twists his face into a rictus that is his way of acknowledging praise, and soaks up the applause.

The Democratic party should listen carefully. The primaries are over now. Tuesday night's final votes in Montana and South Dakota have left Obama in an unassailable position to take his party's nomination. But the prevarication of these past weeks, thanks to Clinton's refusal to step aside, has given McCain valuable time in which to pick up the pieces of a Republican party that have been broken by the current occupant of the White House - a man who now has the highest disapproval ratings of any president in 70 years of polling.

It has given McCain time also to replenish depleted coffers. He now has more cash in hand for the coming election - more than $60m (£31m) - than even the fundraising wunderkind Obama. And it has given him time to win back the disbelievers, those rock-solid conservatives - NRA members being prime examples - who in the past have distrusted his motives.

But in the process McCain has planted new seeds of doubt. There is now real confusion about what kind of man Obama will be up against as the race enters its final stretch. Listen to what McCain said on Tuesday night in Louisiana as he was marking the point at which the presidential race proper with Obama truly began. "The American people didn't get to know me yesterday, as they are just getting to know Senator Obama," he said, playing the experience card. But it is not at all certain that he is right about that. Do the American people know McCain? Or put it another way; which version of himself will he present to the American people? Will it be Old John McCain, the fiercely independent maverick? Or will it be the gun-loving, tax-cutting tub-thumper to which the NRA was treated in Kentucky? Will the real John McCain please stand up.

The label of maverick can be attached to McCain from a very young age, aligned to his quick temper. When he was two, he would have tantrums in which he held his breath until he fainted. That character trait runs through his later military and political careers, maturing into a spirited streak of rebelliousness and defiance. At Naval Academy he was known for his refusal to conform to rules he thought stupid or unfair and as a man who regularly got into fights.

Such aggression earned him few plaudits in military college (he graduated 894th out of 899), but it did help him survive his Vietnam ordeal after he was shot down over Hanoi on a bombing raid in 1967. The heroism that he displayed there is about the only thing on which McCain watchers can agree. He endured abuses that have left him with a limp and unable to raise his arms above shoulder height. Despite two years in solitary confinement and intermittent torture inflicted by a prison guard he called "the Prick", he cracked and gave information only once after a particularly gruesome four-day beating.

In a Senate career spanning more than two decades he has displayed moments of the same impressive refusal to fall into line. Some of the most striking have been made in open contravention of George Bush - the man who had beaten him in 2000 through the application of some fairly ruthless tactics. McCain got his own back just a few months into the 43rd presidency by voting against the Bush tax cuts. Later, he went so far as to flirt with the idea of defecting to be Democrat John Kerry's running mate in the 2004 presidential elections.

"He despised Bush after his defeat in the 2000 race, and he returned to the Senate estranged from his Republican colleagues," says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution thinktank. "He loves putting it to those who cross him. But now he's decided that his last shot at the presidency has to be made as a Republican, and that means getting back on board."

What does getting back on board entail? Let's look first at those tax cuts. McCain was one of only two senators who opposed Bush's first round of them in 2001, on the grounds that they benefited the rich and were "budget-busters". He repeated his noncompliance in 2003, by which time the invasion of Iraq had happened, saying that tax-cutting was wrong in times of war.

What does he say now? He will make the tax cuts, which are due to expire in 2010, permanent, at a cost of $5 trillion (£3 trillion) over 10 years - equivalent to slashing three-quarters of the social security budget. To do otherwise, says New John McCain, would be tantamount to imposing a tax increase, and that he will never do.

Then there is the McCain-Feingold act, the legislation to clean up party finance by restricting the leverage of lobbies that he pioneered and which helped seal his reputation for bold reform and independence of mind. It passed in 2002. Skip forward six years and we now find his campaign team stuffed with lobbyists whose clients have included telecoms companies, tobacco giants, Big Pharma and defence contractors. Lobbyists who naturally directed their attentions at the Senate commerce and armed services committees - bodies which share a very powerful senior member: one John McCain. Last month, the whiff of conflict of interest grew so strong that he was forced to impose new rules that purged several aides from his staff.

The new rules are being policed by his campaign manager, Rick Davis, who until he joined the McCain campaign two years ago worked as a lobbyist for telecoms and foreign interests. Also still on the team is Charles Black, his senior adviser, whose lobbying career stretches back to Ronald Reagan's day when, according to the New York Observer, he worked on behalf of such luminaries as Presidents Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.

Or take McCain's stance on religion. In the 2000 race, he went around joking that the thing to remember about the Christian right was that it was neither. It was then, too, that he announced that he would not pander to televangelists such as Falwell or Pat Robertson.

And now? For the past two years he has been rebuilding those bridges as fast as he knocked them down. In 2006, he went tail between legs to speak at Falwell's Liberty University. More recently, he has promised to appoint only conservative judges to the supreme court - a key aspiration of anti-abortionists and NRA gun fanatics alike. He has said he favours a constitutional amendment to ban abortion in almost all cases; endorsed the teaching of anti-Darwinian intelligent design in state schools; and has been "proud" to accept the endorsement of a televangelist John Hagee who makes Obama's problem pastor, Jeremiah Wright, sound tame by comparison. Last month, McCain broke off the relationship after comments surfaced from Hagee in which he said that the Holocaust was God's device to drive the Jews back to Israel.

Such blatant pandering to interests that he used bravely to rise above has been a cause of anguish to many of McCain's admirers who have cringed to see it happening. Mann is one of them. He worked personally with the senator on the McCain-Feingold legislation and remembers his passionate spirit. "By God, he really took that seriously. He didn't give a damn - this was what he was going to do, it was his crusade. But now he says he will appoint conservative supreme court judges who are exactly the kind who would overturn McCain-Feingold. People are bound to be disappointed when they see the imperatives of a candidacy move in a very different direction."

The important point, though, is that the moulding of New John McCain has worked. In a poll published this week, 80% of Southern Baptists, the largest protestant denomination with 16 million members and a strong conservative bent, said they would vote for him in November. "Right now he is satisfying most of our concerns about him. He's done a good job mending fences," says Richard Land, a prominent Southern Baptist minister.

It is not as though Old John McCain has vanished altogether. That version of the senator for Arizona is rolled out at important moments. A week before he does obeisance to the gun crowd, I watch McCain scurrying around a science park in New Jersey, surrounded by hyperventilating kids begging for his auto-graph. That rictus was on his face again, and he would wink at the schoolchildren avuncularly before scurrying off again. The venue had been strategically selected for a set speech to show off the senator's green credentials. "I'm proud of my record on the environment," he said. "As president I will dedicate myself to addressing the issue of climate change globally."

It is true that over the past eight years he has been working alongside Democrats to push global warming up the Congressional agenda, and that he was the only Republican candidate in the primaries with a policy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But it is also true that his environmental record over the years has been patchy. For instance, he voted against the tightening of fuel efficiency standards on vehicles. The non-party political League of Conservation Voters has kept a running score card and rates his record at just 26%, compared with Obama's 96%.

But again, the important thing is that it has worked. Strategically timed and located speeches such as these have kept the notion of Old John McCain, the maverick progressive who can speak across the political divide, alive with voters. His biographer Matt Welch, who has deconstructed the McCain image in a book called The Myth of a Maverick, points out that he consistently polled well through the primaries among non-core Republicans. "He has this great foothold with people - he's treated with great sympathy among Democrats and independents and the media. He's had the best media appeal of any Republican in the past 20 years. People tend to project their views on to him and give him the benefit of the doubt."

People also tend to forget. They forget that in his social policies the image of the independent, free-thinking Old John McCain was always a myth. Michael Podhorzer of the national trade union body AFL-CIO says that McCain never existed. "On several issues he was always very far to the right," he says.

McCain has voted to restrict union rights across the US, has backed cuts in health provision for the elderly, supports the burden of health insurance being taken away from employers and put on the shoulders of individuals, and would see social security privatised in the form of private accounts. In April, he skipped a Senate vote on giving women equal pay for equal work, arguing that it would encourage litigation. He has opposed every attempt to raise the minimum wage since it was last increased in 1997.

On a more personal level, they forget, too, that the angry streak that has been with him since he was two has its unpleasant side. It earned him the moniker "McNasty" at school and "Senator Hothead" on Capitol Hill. The McNasty side comes out sometimes through his sense of humour, as in the joke he told to a Republican fund-raiser at the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?" he japed. "Because her father is [then attorney general] Janet Reno."

Or it can take a passive aggressive form, the flavour of which is given in a YouTube video of an exchange between him and Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times. He responds to a question from her that clearly irritates him with a bullying abruptness.

Bumiller got off lightly. Others have been told, to their faces, that they are "shitheads", "fucking jerks" and "assholes". And they were Republicans. Cliff Schecter, a political blogger and erstwhile McCain admirer, relates in his book The Real McCain an incident from 1992 that he sourced from three journalists from the senator's home state of Arizona. McCain's wife Cindy was playfully twiddling with his hair one day.

"You're getting a little thin up there," she said.

McCain grew red in the face and replied: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

Sidney Blumenthal, a former White House aide to Bill Clinton who has chronicled the travails of the Republican party in The Strange Death of Republican America, says that there has always been a slightly detached quality to McCain. "He has not engendered a lot of trust among those who know him well. That goes back to the days when he was a pilot, up there in the sky, alone. He did not have to command loyalty among his troops on the ground; that's not who he was, or who he is."

Talk of troops on the ground swings us round to the most controversial part of the record - his militaristic foreign policy. This is not an area where the senator can be accused of pandering to the right of his party to heal old wounds. Militarism is in his blood, as it was for generations of McCains before him. His direct forebears have seen active duty in every major war America has fought from the Revolution through to his own service in Vietnam, and his 18-year-old son Jimmy is now deployed in Iraq. His father was the first son of a four-star admiral to attain the same rank.

Though his views on intervention have changed over the years, since 1998 he has been among the most hawkish politicians in Congress, talking about "rogue-state rollback" long before Bush made it his mantra. In the build-up to Iraq, McCain was as gung-ho as any. He has never identified himself as a neo-con, but given the support he offered the now discredited Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and his predictions that American troops would be hailed as heroes on the streets of Baghdad, he might as well have done. "I am very certain that this military engagement will not be very difficult," he told CNN six months before the invasion.

His faith in the rightness of the cause has never been shaken, as seen by his politically risky backing of the Bush surge. His deep belief - one that can be traced back to his views on Vietnam, which he has never seen as an unjustified war - is that in the end US military might will triumph, as long as politicians and media pundits are kept out of it.

That same belief is now informing the senator's belligerent stance on Iran. His penchant for inappropriate jokes caught him out again last year when he gave his own rendition of the Beach Boys' Barbara Ann - Bomb Iran. "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway," he sang. Further trouble ensued more recently when he accused Iran of secretly training al-Qaida - a comment hurriedly retracted as a slip of the tongue that was breathtaking in its ignorance.

With war weariness running high in the US, McCain has taken a huge gamble in backing the Bush strategy in Iraq. It has given the Democrats and their liberal supporters their main weapon in the coming presidential election - to portray him as Bush III or Bush McClone.

Eli Pariser, head of MoveOn, the internet-based liberal campaign, expects to be able to throw $25m at the coming election in TV ads and other forms of persuasion. "The greatest concern people have about McCain is that he will continue the direction set by Bush and we intend to educate people about the truth of his voting record, countering the spin that he is independent," he says.

Staff at the McCain HQ profess to be unfazed by such threats. They are confident that they have successfully achieved their first target - to win back the Republican faithful. Soon they will be able to swing their focus on to the independents and swing voters.

"We know the Democrats will attack him as Bush III - but that's not going to hold with voters," says a campaign spokesperson, Crystal Benton. "They know he's a different sort of candidate. From global warming to getting wasteful spending under control, his approach is quite different to that of President Bush, and that will resonate with people."

In his speech on Tuesday night, McCain gave a clue to how he will personally respond to the Bush III attack, seeking to turn the accusation of more of the same old politics back on Obama. He mocked Obama's slogan, "Change we can believe in". Yes, this election would all be about change, he said, "but the choice is between the right change and the wrong change, between going forward and going backward".

So which candidate will the voters believe? The Democrats this year undoubtedly have the wind behind them, while McCain, sailing in the opposite direction, will have to tack like hell. The latest polls suggest that if the election were held today Obama and McCain would be level pegging.

More worryingly for the Democrats, a Gallup survey last month put McCain well ahead with white voters - at 53% to Obama's 37% - a disparity that could prove crucial in key swing states and that is chillingly similar to poll figures in 2004 between Bush and Kerry.

Blumenthal is convinced that the Democrats write McCain off at their peril. "McCain is a very serious candidate who shouldn't be underestimated, especially by Obama. McCain's singularity enables him to manoeuvre in ways that many other Republicans could not."

It is quite likely that the senator for Arizona will continue to manoeuvre over the remaining 152 days left of campaigning. One day he will be promising to bring a new era of bipartisanship to Washington, the next he will be banging the drum for the right to bear arms. In the end, the old John McCain and the new, the maverick free-thinker and the rightwing panderer, will just have to get used to living with each other as they travel the country on the Straight Talk Express.

If they go all the way, as they just might, and together take up joint residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, then it will be another matter. Then the world will demand to know the truth. Will the real John McCain please stand up.